The Caine Prize for African Writing
is back and, as we did last year, we’ll be joining Aaron Bady’s community to
discuss what makes the five finalists tick. This year, however, I’ll be taking
a close look at each story’s prehistory, from its influences to its allusions.
This week’s entry comes from Nigeria: Elnathan John’s “Bayan Layi.”

How can religious faith sit
comfortably beside the messy horrors of boys fighting to the death? In “Bayan
Layi,” this contradiction in terms is reconciled only when the boys that fight
put all their faith in Allah. “See how Allah does His things,” the boy telling
the story insists. “We didn’t even beat him too much. We have beaten people
worse, wallahi, and they didn’t die.
But Allah chooses who lives and who dies. Not me. Not us.”

Children can, at times, be
incredibly cruel, and symbols of unexpected filth and impurity
are everywhere: “White [cloth] is hard to keep clean, soap is expensive and the water
in the river will make it brown even when you wash it clean.” In this region of Africa, where Islam is the predominant religion, even intensive
Quranic studies can do little to prevent the narrator and his fellow Bayan Layians
from becoming agents of violence.

Elnathan John’s story, which has a
distinct whiff of Lord of the Flies
(or even The Hunger Games),
adroitly dances across the line dividing the divine from the human: Boys kill
each other, political parties bribe locals to help stuff ballots, and “when
someone dies, well, that is Allah’s will.” It is possible to accept this
strange stance because it is filtered through the simplistic language of a
young boy — young enough not to have a mustache, but old enough to burn a man
alive.

Does the story’s childlike voice
succeed in implicating its readers? NoViolet Bulawayo brought a similarly
stunted, hyperkinetic style to We Need New Names
(a chapter of which won the Caine Prize some years ago), and the imperfect
English forces us to fill in the grammatical blanks. And as we fill in those
small blanks, we cannot help but fill in the larger gaps and imagine ourselves
in this world where elections are fixed, family is all but gone and violence
is less a shock than a sign of things to come.

“Bayan Lani” ends with its narrator
running away from the eponymous town, but leaves us unable to run away from the larger questions and problems it poses of violence's many varieties, whether narrative, political, physical or metaphysical.